Designing For Life

What can we learn from coral reefs, marshes, and forests? Could we find answers in their elegance and complexity? John Todd designs systems that do mundane things - like purify water - using natural systems as his guide.

The very fabric of the Earth is changing at our hands. During my
lifetime, more of the world's resources have been consumed than in all
of the rest of human history before I was born. E-commerce is making
this even worse. Also during my lifetime, we've double-glazed the
atmosphere with poisons, to use a phrase from Paul Hawken.

The
challenge of the 21st century is to right the wrongs of the 20th
century. This will require, at a minimum, a design revolution. Where do
we go to get instructions for this design revolution? I think we need
to turn to the 3.5-billion-year experiment that produced life. We need
to return to the forest, the meadow, the pond, the stream, the marsh,
the desert with fresh eyes and decode the information within these
systems; we need to learn how they work and apply this information to
design.

Coral reefs, for example, are ecosystems awash in a sea
almost devoid of nutrients, and these delicate creatures have to
withstand pounding waves and violent storms. These extraordinary
creatures have developed an architecture that breaks up the brute force
of the waves. The plants and animals are so coordinated that minuscule
amounts of nutrients are exchanged in a sort of cosmic dance. The
systems are designed with exquisite complexity, elegance, and
diversity, are and powered by the sun. These are true models for design.

I've
had the good fortune to spend time in many different kinds of
environments around the world and to learn principles around which one
can design. Wherever I go – whether it's a rainforest or a desert or a
coral reef in the middle of the Indian Ocean – I find great
similarities in the ability of nature to self-organize, to self-repair,
to create symbiotic relationships. There seems to be a meta-pattern in
nature that provides the foundation for what I call ecological design.

Ecological
design enables us to invent symbiotic technologies involving humans and
the natural world in which the boundaries between the two come together
quite seamlessly. It is now possible, without destroying wild systems,
to carry out the work of society in partnership with living systems.

An
example of ecological design is the living machine. Living machines,
like ordinary machines, are designed to generate fuels, grow foods,
transform wastes, and regulate climates in buildings. But the
difference between the living machine and the inert machine is that the
living machine is made up of hundreds, more often thousands, of
species, ranging from microorganisms to mollusks to trees. All of these
organisms are integrated together, as they are in nature.

As a
consequence of this integration, living machines have attributes that
most machines do not have. They have the ability to self-design and
self-organize and self-repair, and if the human guide is clever enough,
they also have the ability to self-replicate. A living machine can, in
theory, last for hundreds or possibly thousands of years. It can behave
like a forest.

In order for the living machine to do what you
ask of it – to grow foods or generate fuels or transform wastes or
purify air – the design must include at least three different
ecological types interacting with each other. In other words, if we ask
a pond-like system to be a living machine by itself, it won't work. If
we ask a marsh alone to do the job, it won't work. If we ask a
three-dimensional solar environment, it won't work. But when we link
the three ecological types, they acquire a kind of intelligence that is
phenomenal. They are then able to self-design, self-organize, and
self-repair.

Clean effluent

What can living machines do? Here's one example. The people of Burlington, Vermont, and those on the opposite
side of the lake in the Adirondacks are anxious to protect Lake
Champlain, a gorgeous lake, from the effects of sewage and industrial
runoff. We decided to create a living technology that would purify
sewage to very high standards, therefore putting back into the lake
water that is as pure as possible. In that cold climate, this task
requires a greenhouse to keep the biological activity going during the
darkest, coldest times of year.

When you walk inside the
greenhouse, you see over 400 species of plants, all of which are being
studied for their ability to contribute to the purification of water.
Each does something that others can't do. Some kill human pathogens.
Others take up heavy metals. Others sequester or break up nutrients in
concert with other organisms.

The building contains a whole
series of cells. There are actually three waste treatment plants
operating in parallel. The wastes go from cell to cell, from being raw
sewage at one end to ultra-pure water at the other end in a little over
two days. Along the way, the water is exposed to a wide variety of
organisms.

Koi and goldfish consume the dead and dying
bacteria that normally produce sludge. Our society puts sludge on
landfills or incinerates it, creating all sorts of problems. To an
ecological designer, if you have heavy sludge it just means that your
design is incomplete. The goal is to turn the sludge into feed, so the
dead and dying bacteria produce thousands and thousands of fish. Then,
instead of a waste problem, you have a biological by-product. As we
build these living machines, we're learning that ecological design
produces internal economies where none were visible before. In this
case, the living machine also reduces to almost nothing organic
emissions and ammonia.

A system like the South Burlington Living
Machine can withstand perturbations. We occasionally have gasoline and
other toxics poured down the sewers, and this system is somehow able to
compensate for these violations.

At a rest stop on the
interstate in Vermont we have another living machine. This living
technology doesn't discharge anything into the natural environment at
all. After the waste is purified, it's sterilized, and the water goes
back into the toilets and comes around again. New water that runs
through the taps and drinking fountains makes up for the water that is
lost through evapotranspiration into the atmosphere. It's a closed
cycle. These facilities are great for educating the public to the
virtues of ecological design.

These ecological design ideas can
be applied in very, very difficult processes. We designed a living
machine at a chocolate factory in Las Vegas. Chocolate waste is very
difficult to deal with because it has lots of fats, oils, and greases
that most organisms, except for human beings, have a hard time
digesting.

This chocolate factory waste treatment system is
incorporated into a desert botanical garden, which I hear is now the
second most visited non-gaming place in Las Vegas. As you walk through
the garden, you see dark, chocolaty water that gets cleaner and cleaner
as it flows through the different ecological tanks. Out the end comes
beautiful water, which is reused to irrigate the landscape and for
other non-potable purposes at the factory. It is not discharged; the
water is too precious.

Living technologies can also be
integrated into our buildings. Children from Toronto's inner city
neighborhoods spend a few weeks at a time at Boyne River School
studying Native American culture and natural history. The school, which
is about 74 miles north of Toronto, was designed to honor native and
green ideas. In the center is a sacred fire, which the children keep
alive by feeding it sticks. The school building captures and generates
its own energy. It captures and recycles its own water. It heats and
cools itself naturally.

When you walk in the south side, the
first thing you're confronted with is a beautiful water garden with
tall spires. Then you see little engineered marshes and ponds. The
ponds in the center have gorgeous rock sculptures rising out of the
water, and on these rock sculptures are mosses. There are fountains
powered by a single photovoltaic panel on the roof, and when the sun
shines, the water flows broadly. When it's cloudy, it runs more
quietly, and at night, it stops running. So the children know the
amount of energy striking the building at any given moment. It's
interesting that this variation is the perfect set of flow combinations
for mosses. If you've ever looked at mosses under a microscope, you've
seen they're among the greatest filtering organisms on the face of the
planet. They expand and contract depending on the amount of moisture.
Their internal architecture is so beautiful it would make Buckminster
Fuller blush. Now the children know why mosses are associated with some
of the purest waters on the planet.

When bad places get good

One
of the important things we can do is to do good things in bad places.
Flax Pond on Cape Cod, receives almost 30 million gallons a year of
toxic substances from a neighboring landfill. When we started, the pond
was essentially dead. There was no oxygen and little alive on the
bottom of the pond. The flow of poison into the pond will continue
right on to the year 2025, even though the landfill will be capped by
the end of the year.

So we created a technology that's part marsh, part pond, part mangrove and floated it on the pond. We
called it The Restorer. The Restorer is powered by the sun and wind. We
put in various cells and various combinations of organisms.

Every
day 100,000 gallons are lifted up from the bottom of the pond and
through this system. It's infused with oxygen and air along the way.
Within two years, over two feet of sediments on the bottom of the
pond were actually broken down and digested. Oxygen returned. The
biological diversity increased many fold. The fish began to come back,
and now there are very healthy populations of fish that show no sign of
contamination. They are cleaner than the fishes living in the ocean
nearby.

This is an example of the kind of partnership that can
develop between humans and the natural world when we go to the natural
world for instructions. And these examples can be layered like folds in
a baklava, to create the design of a whole town – a process we are now
undertaking.

I think we could see the end of a negative human
footprint through intelligent design and the associated social changes
that are necessary to make it happen. This work on ecological design
has convinced me that it's possible to create a culture, as many
cultures have before us, where wilderness permeates into every place
and there's harmony with the natural world. We can create a culture in
balance with nature.

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